The intent of this PhD research is to critically examine the language of Bombay’s Art Deco architecture from 1930 to 1949 in order to develop a semiotic to read meaning into its form. By retrospectively describing this architecture as ‘Art Deco’ (the term came into common currency from the ‘60s), this period has been studied as a stylistic label, with the baggage of colonialism (the copying of a foreign architecture) and revivalism weighing it down. Such an approach regards all the buildings of a particular period as more or less homogeneous, and built out of the same common motivating factors. . In examining the facades of cinema houses, office buildings and apartment buildings of the period 1930-1949 our aim was to read these buildings as the billboards of their age, as metonymic representations of the whole. In previous work done on the subject this vital component has not been tackled and our intention has been to research into these buildings as rich semiotic/semantic texts. Our research looks at these buildings as objects in themselves and seeks out semiotic congruency in the buildings of Bombay during the 1930s and 1940s. The processes, methods and tools adopted are semiotic, and the objects/buildings examined and analyzed synchronously and (largely) from an ahistoric standpoint. The set of research tools chosen for this semiotic analysis were used to observe and analyse the signification of objects. These properties are used to generate an ‘exemplar’. Based on the determination of exemplars, a bundle of features or Basic Objects were derived, and then validated for proximity. These properties were then be searched for, metonymically, in other such objects for ‘self-similarity’ or ‘family resemblances’. The aim of this research is to find, if any, patterns of collective significance in the buildings of Bombay from 1930-1949.The methodical framework we used for carrying out this research was as follows: The building facades under study were looked at as cultural products of their time and contextualised in order to appreciate the ‘conventional meanings’ attributed to them. This research has produced a better understanding of Art Deco architecture in Bombay as significant producers of meaning. We believe that our research contributes to the architectural xvi history of pre-independence Bombay and India, Art Deco architecture and building facades, and offers methods for any future semiotic analyses in architecture. There is a further scope of using the tools adapted for this research in the analysis of buildings other than Art Deco as having inherencies and salience. We believe that this research has made significant contributions to the field of architectural design and historical research.